The following is poet, essayist and literary critic Ashok Vajpeyi’s lecture titled ‘Reconciliation and Art’ from the 9th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, organised by Suhas Borker at India International Centre on July 18, 2026. The Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture was instituted at IIC in 2018 to mark the Centenary of Madiba, the revered clan name of Nelson Mandela. §When you think of Nelson Mandela, you invariably think of an alternative camaraderie of M.K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, which brought about radical changes in society and polity by non-violence. This was in sharp contrast to the violence perpetrated by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill et cetera, who also brought about major changes.Again, Mandela’s name also evokes three cardinal values: freedom, truth and reconciliation. He attained freedom of his country and people from the dual evils of colonialism and apartheid, insisted on the prevalence of truth in human affairs and believed in and promoted reconciliation. In this, Mandela should be remembered and revered as an iconic epic warrior of ‘Satyagrah.’When Mandela was given a life sentence for his actions against apartheid, he spoke from the dock:“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”Let us consider what freedom could mean; personal, social, cultural, political, economic, spiritual, legal freedom. It would also mean freedom to live, to question, to celebrate; to search and discover truth, to explore and examine truth, to proclaim, to stand by, to speak truth to power. It would include freedom to remember, to forget, to forgive, to reject, to accept, to nurture, to care, to be concerned, to interrogate. It should also mean freedom to retain, to reclaim, to return, to reassert, to revive, to innovate, to assimilate, to accommodate, to arrive, to leave, to abandon, to surrender, to survive. And, more importantly, to deviate, to disagree, to debate, to dissent and to reconcile. As Nadine Gordimer said: “Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.”Mandela gave a new meaning to freedom: free not to hate, not to revenge, not to punish. A conscientious negativity – a refusal to fall a victim to negative imagination, hateful revenge-driven conduct.Mandela, in his autobiography, noted that the freedom struggle needed to have the willingness to suffer and sacrifice. He invoked Gandhi and urged the African National Congress leaders to be willing to violate the law and if necessary, go to prison for their beliefs, as Gandhi had.One of the boldest initiatives of Mandela was to appoint the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Desmond Tutu. As is well known, it was inspired by the African concept of “Ubuntu,” which is rooted in the emphasis on community and restorative justice, as “amnesty for truth” as Tutu described it. Nadine Gordimar noted at that time: ‘Those who come forward and confess fully what they did and why, in the past, may be granted forgiveness and in some cases amnesty. It is going to be a process full of doubts and difficulties, both for the perpetrators of ghostly deeds and the families of those they killed or maimed. But it is surely the way to deal with the past of a people who have to live with it, together, a dedicated move towards making South Africa a human place to live in, today.”Also, we should remember that a last clause was added to the interim constitution which stated that “there is need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.”The commission comprised three committees: the Human Rights Violations Committee, the Amnesty Committee and the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee. By the end of its life, the Human Rights Violations Committee had gathered close to 22,000 statements, covering 37,000 violations, which is more than any previous truth commission had achieved. 2,000 people testified publicly. Special hearings were held focusing on a theme, institution or event: medical services; media; big business; the Soweto uprisings; the group of youth called the Mandela United Football Club. An African writer Antjie Krog has said: “The striking features of the South African TRC-public hearings, individualised amnesty and allowing victims fighting for and against apartheid to testify on the same forum—can all be traced back to the desire to restore the interconnectedness of a community. Because people share each other’s pain, the audience has as much right to be in the presence of the testimony as the testifier; because people who are prepared to apply for amnesty are willing to admit that they have done wrong, they could begin to change and eventually be readmitted into society; because mothers who lost their loved ones fighting for the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ side suffer alike, they are interconnected.Interconnectedness-towards-wholeness is more than just a theoretical knowledge that all things in the world are linked. It means both a mental and physical awareness that one can only become who one is, or could be, through the fullness of that which is round one-both physical and metaphysical. Wholeness is thus not a passive state of nirvana but a process of becoming in which everyone and everything moves towards its fullest self, building itself. One can, however, only reach that fullest self through and with others, which include ancestors and the universe.”Let us now turn to reconciliation in more general terms. When do we seek reconciliation? When adversities, differences, enmities, misunderstandings, misgivings, hurts and hatred reach a point of no return, when they are interminably present, keep on escalating, divide at every level, when there is a sense that life has to move on, when there is greater value put on life and ongoing flow of life. When there is a concern that past reality must be allowed to pass and not soil, taint, encumber the present; when there is anxiety that revengefulness could be an endless cycle of negativity and destruction; when there is acceptance that others have different ways of viewing, understanding and changing the world.All these need to be reconciled with each other. In ordinary life, people do keep on exercising such reconciliation. The “othering” imposed and often vigorously promoted by ideologies and the State spreads and all too often severely damages the existing reconciliation. Reconciliation is an ethical and moral art. Not merely an act, but art.Art, should we say arts and literature, are not commissioned but by their very nature are an unfinished project of exploration of human truth and reconciliation. Faced with ever growing amnesia and manufactured memories, arts attempt to remember and recall, not to forget but always, almost always to forgive. They are luminous sites of human conscience, human justice, human togetherness, human forgiveness.Arts are acutely aware of the growing banality of evil in our times and societies. Evil takes many forms: social, political, moral, religious, ideological.Sigmund Freud, one of those thinkers who had a worldwide and enduring impact on literature and the arts, put in words that seem to come from the realm of literature rather than mere psychology. He asked: “Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies which are able to spread over the civilised world. Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt?”Though not appointed by any authority, the arts assume the role of chroniclers and truth–tellers of their times. Many a time they constitute the most reliable evidence, truthful record of happenings, good or evil, of times which happen to be tyrannical, restrictive and ultimately evil. They become a kind of satyagrah against dominant and unrelenting forces of evil, lies, delusions, oppressions. They are able to put together a camaraderie, howsoever small but irrepressible, of truth and reconciliation.Arts insist that the world given to us, is beautiful; it is the only world given to us, it is the world we can nurture and sustain, or unmake or destroy. They also suggest, in many different ways, that in the human world nothing is infallible: gods and religions, relationships, values and visions, regimes and structures, ideas and technologies.Barring some exceptions, by and large, literature and the arts have abided the dictum of Simone Weil: “Refuse to be an accomplice. Don’t lie, don’t keep your eyes shut.”India, today, is also in the grip of some versions of apartheid: caste-apartheid which, unfortunately, not only survived but seems to have been strengthened by electoral politics and crony capitalism; religious apartheid which aspires to reduce all minorities to secondary citizenship and lastly, ideological apartheid which shuns all disagreement, dissent and debate.We cannot but notice that in society and polity there are powerful and popular trends, namely: widespread lies and delusions, growing numbers who believe in and practice lies, hatred and violence and amnesia which forgets but does not forgive. Also, there is almost daily “othering” on the basis of caste, creed, religion and more. The more visible sites where one could expect facts to emerge like the media, the academia have, in a very large part, become agents of the State, the loyalists of lies and hatred, unconcerned with objectivity, justice, and fair play. In such extremely depressing circumstances, arts and literature in the many Indian languages have emerged as the conscience keepers, the truth chroniclers, the candid interrogators, the custodians of memory, the sites of reconciliation. In India, religions have succumbed particularly Hinduism to politicisation and have in fact, more or less, abandoned or undermined their true and liberating spirituality, having reduced themselves to ritualism. Literature and arts in India today are the new residence and address of spirituality.The idea of reconciliation need not be confined to violence, violation and their aftermath. In India one could cite three instances in which aesthetic and moral reconciliation has taken place, accepting the presence and possibility of “the other.”Firstly, the Bhakti poets wrote in a period of the domination of the others, the Mughals. There were widespread tensions between Hinduism and Islam. Kabir, the weaver-poet, severely criticised both the religions, their strict confinement to holy books, ritualism and temples and mosques. He reconciled, suggesting a more personal, a neighbourly God and thereby, a holistic spirituality. Tulsidas, the epic poet, who created an alternative republic of imagination calling it Ram Rajya, was abused by high caste Hindus, and asserted that “he would eat by begging, sleep in the mosque and would have nothing to do with one or the other.”Secondly, under the Mughals, Iranian music came to India and many of its elements, though from outside, were incorporated in Hindustani classical music. The reconciliation was strengthened by Muslim musicians who took to music in spite of the Islamic ambivalence on music. The Hindustani Classical Music is in fact a glorious, creative and enduring product of reconciliation.Thirdly, the miniature painting came to India from Persia, and the early masters were all from Iran. Yet soon enough, the miniature painting, its technique became popular in India with many Indian masters practising it. One can recall that the Mughal school of painting originated in Akbar’s durbar out of a need to illustrate the Persian translation of Valmiki’s Ramayan.On the other hand, religion has become the new battleground in politics. Politics is mercilessly subverting, exploiting, maiming religions in many parts of the world, specially in India. In India, where the Mahabharat, the great Hindu epic, had ordained that “one should follow that religion only which is not opposed to any other religion;” where Gandhi had famously said that “all religions are true but they are all imperfect;” where the medieval saint-poet Narasee Mehta, a favourite of Gandhi, had memorably said “he should be called Vaishnav who knows the pain of others.”Truth discovered and invented by the arts is never singular – its plural, always tentative, invariably ambiguous. Artistic and literary truths are saved from being dictatorial or tyrannical. The ambiguity and plurality of truth inevitably leads the arts to reconciliation. They become an open site where different truths, different visions, different voices could be in interaction, dialogue and debate.Let me remind you that the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, yet another Nobel Laureate, has pointed out that the one simple lesson literature teaches is that there are no others: we are them, they are us.Ours is a very difficult time. Globally, the liberal space, for dialogue and reconciliation, indeed for truth and understanding, is disastrously shrinking. Politics based on lies, hatred, violence and economics based on exclusion and exploitation seem to be triumphant. Tyrants rise and survive through democratic processes.As much as we are in an age of post-truth, we may as well have entered in an age of post-reconciliation. In such thickening global darkness, it is difficult to entertain hope, to discover it, to look for its current architecture. And yet arts remind us that there are “duties of despair.”As Seamus Heaney put it: “History says, don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a life-timeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme.”I want conclude on this note – But then!Ashok Vajpeyi is a well-known Hindi poet-critic and art lover.